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Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Kelly and I thought it would be fun to have a contest and give away a signed copy of TOP TEN USES FOR AN UNWORN PROM DRESS. Here’s all you have to do:

Go to the Comments Section (below) and log in--or--send a private e-mail to me at tina@tinaferraro.com, and tell us your idea of a perfect prom dress.

Here’s our TOP TEN hints to help you:

1--If you’ve got a way with words, WOW us with description.
2--If you’ve got a picture, give us a link.
3--Pictures from your prom or of your dress are of course welcome!
4--Including cute guys in pictures is much appreciated, but not a consideration in the actual judging process. :)
5--Pick something you love. Kelly and I dress differently, so your best bet of wowing us both is with something really special.
6--Remember that formal dress lengths can vary, so short is as good as long.

7--While transparent fabrics work for award shows, we’ve got to keep it high school clean (or covered) here.
8--Accessories are a bonus, but only the dress will be judged.
9--Enter as many times as you like, as long as each time, it is a different dress.
10--We really want YOU to win, so do enter!

The contest starts the moment this post appears and goes to midnight on Thursday, March 15th. We'll announce the winner Friday morning Pacific Standard Time, on or before 9:00 am.

If I ever went to a prom, I would be wearing this Hello Kitty DressWhy? Because it would make me stand out so much it wouldn't matter that I botched my make-up, my hair looked like crazy and my date was the super nerd with the paisley tie. All anyone would remember was "Hey, you were the one with the pink Hello kitty dress, right?"

Seriously though?I love this orange dress.It's bold, beautiful and sexy without being too slutty (remember that rule about showing off either your legs or your cleavage, but never both? Well, this is for the less, errh...chesty people).

Oooh, ooh, and I also love this one, because the color is stunning and the details are gorgeous.

What a fun way to while away an hour looking at clothes! Thanks for the fun contest. ^_^

I worked at a fabric store in HS and sewed a lot of my own clothes, and I had this dress in my mind that I wanted to make - part Barbie, part fairy, part Star Trek space princess (original series, of couse). White, strapless, with layers of tulle, and here was the coolest part: I would take glow-in-the-dark puffy paint and make dots all over the skirt, so that when the lights went out and I was dancing with Prince Charming, I would glow with little stars in my skirt. Never mind that glow-in-the-dark puffy paint had a faintly greenish hue. It would be that absolutely perfect dress, like Sam got on Who's the Boss, except that I wouldn't discover my frenemy wearing the exact same dress.

Alas, I was too shy to glow in the dark, so I made a black dress instead. But my consolation: I married Prince Charming, and now I have a lil toddler who would loooove to wear a glow in the dark fairy-space-princess dress. So I might just get out those puffy paints one of these days.

My dream dress was one I actually tried on, but guilted myself out of buying. It wasn't exactly the conventional prom dress, but I don't exactly have the conventional form, either, so exceptions had to be made.

The truth was, I wasn't even shopping for a dress myself, I was with a friend and her mom, looking for her dress, since she was the one with the perfect boyfriend, the correct bodyweight, and, well, the actual invitation to the dance.

We'd skipped bothering with our own mall and went straight to a larger one about an hour from where we lived, and I'd never seen such a sea of formal wear in my entire life. Many were tried on and discarded: red, royal blue, angel pink, A-line, princess-cut, taffeta. We went from shop to shop and I--mostly out of envy and self-pity, let's face it--shrugged my shoulders uninterestedly at them all.

And then there was this one. It didn't look like any of the other dress hanging on it near the rack, it didn't even look like any of the other dresses in the store! Which is exactly why when I drew my friend's attention to it, she looked at it a little askance. But she urged me to try it on, which of course, I'd been dying to do anyway.

Once I had it on in front of the three-way mirror, I almost died. I didn't feel like a prom queen wearing this. I felt--excuse the cliché--like a movie star.

The dress was strapless, and form-fitting all the way down, until it flared out a little at my feet, trumpet-style. All the anxieties I'd been having about my awkward frame with the other dresses melted away. The truth was, I had curves to kill for, full chest and hips, but flat (enough) stomach. The rest of the dresses I'd been trying on were built for skinny, stick-straight girls, and here I was, dressed like a woman.

The dress was bright white, making my skin look even tanner than it was, and it was covered in sequins, also white, but there was one undulating river of black starting high-up on the left side and working its way down and across, thinning out to nothing by the time it got to wrapping around my right calf. With my hair done up just right, I could have looked like some exotic, 1920s starlet, in full-bloom. Just standing in that dress was a sort of dream.

Dreams, though, have this way of ending. I hadn't come to the shop at all expecting to buy a dress for myself, and even though my friend's mom offered to get it for me and let me pay them back, it was way beyond my price-range. Especially if I didn't even end up going to the dance, since considering it was only our Junior year, wasn't going to happen if I was stag. And the truth was my mother would never have let me wear a strapless dress anyhow.

I still think, sometimes, though, that if I could go back to that day, to that dress, I'd snap it up in a moment, and damn the consequences. Feeling the way I did when I wore it would have been worth it.